Last Call For Three Wars

Just a note that going into next week the Trump regime is looking at three wars right now:

a legal war with Democrats,

President Trump reversed himself on Sunday and said that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, should not testify before Congress, setting up a potentially explosive confrontation with Democrats over presidential authority and the separation of powers.

The president argued on Twitter that Mr. Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election — which found no conspiracy between Moscow and Mr. Trump’s campaign but did not exonerate the president on obstruction of justice — was conclusive and that Congress and the American people did not need to hear from Mr. Mueller. “Bob Mueller should not testify,” he said. “No redos for the Dems!”

On Friday, Mr. Trump had said it was up to Attorney General William P. Barr whether Mr. Mueller testified. The president’s about-face now puts new pressure on Mr. Barr, who must decide whether to accede to Mr. Trump’s call. Last week, Mr. Barr said he had no objection to Mr. Mueller testifying.

The conflict over Mr. Mueller escalates Mr. Trump’s fight with Democrats just as his re-election campaign is taking shape. It comes on top of numerous refusals by the administration to turn over records to Congress, including a request for Mr. Trump’s tax returns. Mr. Trump has also balked at testimony from his former White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II.

A trade war with China,

The sudden escalation of trade tensions could badly catch investors off guard. Not only had US and Chinese officials signaled a trade deal was imminent, but hopes for trade peace helped drive US stocks sharply higher this year. 

Trump said that he believed talks were progressing too slowly and the tariff increase could happen "shortly." He also warned his administration could tax nearly all of the roughly $500 billion of Chinese exports to the United States. 

The two countries had planned a critical week of negotiations to end a yearlong tit-for-tat trade war.

And a shooting war in Venezuela.

Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said the U.S. has a full range of options available to help oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and didn’t rule out “ultimately” using military action on top of diplomatic, political and other pressure points.

“We’re preparing those for him so that when the situation arises, we’re not flat-footed,’’ Pompeo said on ABC’s “This Week,” one of three scheduled appearances on Sunday morning political shows.

Pompeo said Sunday that he can’t predict when Maduro will be forced out of office -- whether days, weeks or months. But Maduro can’t feel good about his situation because while he might be ruling for the moment, he can’t govern, Pompeo said.

“There’s enormous poverty, enormous starvation, sick children that can’t get medicine,” Pompeo said. “This is not someone who can be part of Venezuela’s future.”

May will be messy.

Spawn Of The Nameless One Returns

The announced retirement of Wyoming GOP Sen. Mike Enzi this weekend clears the decks for Liz Cheney, daughter of former VP Dick Cheney, to take up her dad's old Senate seat for essentially a lifetime appointment.

Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi will not run for reelection next year, the four-term Republican senator said on Saturday.

The 75-year-old Senate Budget Committee chairman announced his retirement in Gillette, Wyo., where he used to be mayor. The low-key Wyomingite said he wants to focus on budget reform.

“I don't want to be burdened by the distractions of another campaign,” Enzi said, according to the Casper Tribune.

Senate Republicans have been closely watching Enzi, figuring he may decide to call it quits after 24 years in the Senate, but most were unaware of his weekend plans. Enzi's office did not respond to requests for comment on Saturday morning ahead of the announcement.

Enzi is among the least flashy personalities in the Capitol. He often literally keeps his head down, immersed in either thought or reading, typically wielding an e-reader device.

He frequently ignores reporters to go about his day, which is likely focused on cutting spending and balancing the budget. He posts often about the “penny plan,” which would reduce spending by 1 percent each year. Enzi is term-limited from serving as budget chairman after next year.

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who threatened Enzi with a primary challenge in 2014, praised him on Saturday for “fighting for a smaller, less obstructive, and more efficient federal government that would allow people to grow and thrive.” Her statement did not address whether she will run to succeed Enzi.

The Senate field is likely to be frozen until Cheney — already a statewide elected official — makes a decision. What she decides to do has outsized impact on House Republican politics, as well. If she runs for the Senate, it will remove a potential threat to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.). If she decides to stay in the House, it's a sign she is interested in moving up in House Republican leadership in the coming years.

I will be utterly shocked if Cheney passes this up.  Like Enzi, she could easily spend a comfortable quarter-century in the Senate rather than struggling with constant campaigning and the GOP House clowns.  Unlike McCarthy, Mitch McConnell actually knows what he's doing.

Cheney could still decide not to go after Enzi's seat, but, you know, she already tried to primary him once.

Things will probably move quickly here.  We're not done with Liz by a long shot.

Sunday Long Read: Meteors And Meat-Eaters

Author Douglas Preston writes this week's Sunday Long Read for the New Yorker about what could be the greatest paleontology find in human history...if it's the real deal.

If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour. Sixty hours later, the asteroid hit. The air in front was compressed and violently heated, and it blasted a hole through the atmosphere, generating a supersonic shock wave. The asteroid struck a shallow sea where the Yucatán peninsula is today. In that moment, the Cretaceous period ended and the Paleogene period began.

A few years ago, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory used what was then one of the world’s most powerful computers, the so-called Q Machine, to model the effects of the impact. The result was a slow-motion, second-by-second false-color video of the event. Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.

Some of the ejecta escaped Earth’s gravitational pull and went into irregular orbits around the sun. Over millions of years, bits of it found their way to other planets and moons in the solar system. Mars was eventually strewn with the debris—just as pieces of Mars, knocked aloft by ancient asteroid impacts, have been found on Earth. A 2013 study in the journal Astrobiology estimated that tens of thousands of pounds of impact rubble may have landed on Titan, a moon of Saturn, and on Europa and Callisto, which orbit Jupiter—three satellites that scientists believe may have promising habitats for life. Mathematical models indicate that at least some of this vagabond debris still harbored living microbes. The asteroid may have sown life throughout the solar system, even as it ravaged life on Earth.

The asteroid was vaporized on impact. Its substance, mingling with vaporized Earth rock, formed a fiery plume, which reached halfway to the moon before collapsing in a pillar of incandescent dust. Computer models suggest that the atmosphere within fifteen hundred miles of ground zero became red hot from the debris storm, triggering gigantic forest fires. As the Earth rotated, the airborne material converged at the opposite side of the planet, where it fell and set fire to the entire Indian subcontinent. Measurements of the layer of ash and soot that eventually coated the Earth indicate that fires consumed about seventy per cent of the world’s forests. Meanwhile, giant tsunamis resulting from the impact churned across the Gulf of Mexico, tearing up coastlines, sometimes peeling up hundreds of feet of rock, pushing debris inland and then sucking it back out into deep water, leaving jumbled deposits that oilmen sometimes encounter in the course of deep-sea drilling.

The damage had only begun. Scientists still debate many of the details, which are derived from the computer models, and from field studies of the debris layer, knowledge of extinction rates, fossils and microfossils, and many other clues. But the over-all view is consistently grim. The dust and soot from the impact and the conflagrations prevented all sunlight from reaching the planet’s surface for months. Photosynthesis all but stopped, killing most of the plant life, extinguishing the phytoplankton in the oceans, and causing the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere to plummet. After the fires died down, Earth plunged into a period of cold, perhaps even a deep freeze. Earth’s two essential food chains, in the sea and on land, collapsed. About seventy-five per cent of all species went extinct. More than 99.9999 per cent of all living organisms on Earth died, and the carbon cycle came to a halt.

Earth itself became toxic. When the asteroid struck, it vaporized layers of limestone, releasing into the atmosphere a trillion tons of carbon dioxide, ten billion tons of methane, and a billion tons of carbon monoxide; all three are powerful greenhouse gases. The impact also vaporized anhydrite rock, which blasted ten trillion tons of sulfur compounds aloft. The sulfur combined with water to form sulfuric acid, which then fell as an acid rain that may have been potent enough to strip the leaves from any surviving plants and to leach the nutrients from the soil.

Today, the layer of debris, ash, and soot deposited by the asteroid strike is preserved in the Earth’s sediment as a stripe of black about the thickness of a notebook. This is called the KT boundary, because it marks the dividing line between the Cretaceous period and the Tertiary period. (The Tertiary has been redefined as the Paleogene, but the term “KT” persists.) Mysteries abound above and below the KT layer. In the late Cretaceous, widespread volcanoes spewed vast quantities of gas and dust into the atmosphere, and the air contained far higher levels of carbon dioxide than the air that we breathe now. The climate was tropical, and the planet was perhaps entirely free of ice. Yet scientists know very little about the animals and plants that were living at the time, and as a result they have been searching for fossil deposits as close to the KT boundary as possible.

One of the central mysteries of paleontology is the so-called “three-­metre problem.” In a century and a half of assiduous searching, almost no dinosaur remains have been found in the layers three metres, or about nine feet, below the KT boundary, a depth representing many thousands of years. Consequently, numerous paleontologists have argued that the dinosaurs were on the way to extinction long before the asteroid struck, owing perhaps to the volcanic eruptions and climate change. Other scientists have countered that the three-metre problem merely reflects how hard it is to find fossils. Sooner or later, they’ve contended, a scientist will discover dinosaurs much closer to the moment of destruction.

Locked in the KT boundary are the answers to our questions about one of the most significant events in the history of life on the planet. If one looks at the Earth as a kind of living organism, as many biologists do, you could say that it was shot by a bullet and almost died. Deciphering what happened on the day of destruction is crucial not only to solving the three-­metre problem but also to explaining our own genesis as a species. 

And a graduate student named Robert DePalma claims to have found just that: the best evidence to date that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor.  Scientists from all over are taking a look.

We'll know one way or the other rather soon, I would suspect.

It's All About Revenge Now, Con't

The Trump regime is gearing up for multiple Senate GOP investigations and Justice Department probes into Democrats and the FBI who dared to question Trump, and the political nightmare is just beginning.

Trump and his allies, seeking to amplify claims that the FBI spied on his 2016 campaign, are seizing on news reports and statements by Attorney General William P. Barr to launch a political rallying cry they view as an antidote to special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s findings.

Dismissed by critics as an outlandish conspiracy theory, so-called “spygate” is fast becoming a central feature of the Trump campaign as it seeks to go on offense in the wake of a report that identified 10 instances of potential obstruction of justice by Trump. The campaign is publicly calling for criminal investigations into former FBI officials, making “spygate” fundraising pitches and selling spy-themed merchandise. The goal, officials said, is to turn the Russia probe into a political winner that could help him secure another term.

“After two years of [investigations] and being vindicated, and now in fact the tables are turning in that the investigators will be investigated, there’s a certain amount of righteous indignation that’s warranted,” said Tim Murtaugh, communications director for Trump’s reelection bid. “The president has already shown that he wants to talk about it. He’s been tweeting about it. I’m sure he’ll talk about it at rallies. It’s something that the campaign will continue to point to.”

Murtaugh highlighted a Thursday article from the New York Times describing how the FBI sent an investigator posing as a research assistant to meet with Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos in 2016 — a covert effort to better understand the campaign’s links to Russia. Murtaugh said it was “astounding” that the story had not received as much media coverage as some Russia-related episodes unearthed by Mueller.

Referring to the story on Friday, Trump said it was “bigger than Watergate, as far as I’m concerned.”

Trump has long sought to paint his political opponents as criminally suspect, spending much of 2016 leading “Lock her up!” chants that targeted his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton.

Before the end of the month, I'd assume the investigations and subpoenas will be announced.  They will come at a steady stream, and the American public by this summer will be sick and tired of "both sides" again.

Trump is going to win this thing if Democrats keep playing by his rules.  Any investigation that the Democrats can open, the Senate GOP can, and will.  If that happens, and it will, then Democrats have to be ready to go to the mat.

A lot of things will be decided in our history over the next few weeks, starting with the contempt fight over Bill Barr on Monday.

Last Call For A Taxing Explanation

Donald Trump -- and all presidential candidates -- will have to disclose tax returns to be on the ballot in the nation's most populous state soon.

California will send legislation to Gov. Gavin Newsom's desk requiring presidential candidates to submit five years' worth of tax returns in order to appear on the ballot, joining 18 other states in a jab at President Donald Trump's refusal to release his tax returns. 

California joins New York, Illinois and Washington, among other states, that have introduced bills requiring all candidates to release their individual tax returns to qualify for the presidential primary ballot. Tax returns have become a key 2020 issue, with Trump refusing to surrender them and Democratic presidential candidates sharing their tax information with varying degrees of timeliness.

But it may not be a sure thing.  It's failed once before.

The state's Senate passed the measure by a 27-10 party line vote Thursday, but whether Newsom, a Democrat, will sign the bill remains unclear. 

Newsom spokesman Jesse Melgar told CNN, "with regard to this and all proposed legislation, should the bill reach the Governor's Desk it would be evaluated on its own merits." 

While former California Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed similar legislation in 2017, Newsom has shown support for tax returns in his own political career, releasing his tax returns as a candidate and promising to continue releasing them every year as governor.

Unless Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado and/or Arizona pass legislation to do this, it's meaningless, and odds are extremely low any of those seven states would pass such legislation.

Besides, red states will almost certainly counter with things like, you know, requiring birth certificates and whatnot.  There's a serious chance this becomes a Jim Crow issue, even if the Supreme Court wasn't guaranteed to step in and overturn such legislation.

No, this is a waste of time in the end.  Do you think Trump cares if he's on the ballot in states he'll never win?  Ahh, but red states being able to block the Democratic candidate from getting on the ballot, especially Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, all with overwhelming GOP majorities in state?

It's just because they haven't figured out how to do it yet.  California making this law will make that a top priority.

Let's not go down this road.

Going After The Orange Bloc

Former VP Joe Biden is now comfortably ahead in early Democratic 2020 presidential polling, and he's beating Trump handily in head-to-head matchups.  The reason he's doing this is because he's playing to the middle, and that there's gettable white Trump voters who would vote for Biden over Trump...but tellingly, not for several other non-white, non-male Dems.

As Joseph R. Biden Jr. made his way across Iowa on his first trip as a 2020 presidential candidate, the former vice president repeatedly returned to one term — aberration — when he referred to the Trump presidency.

“Limit it to four years,” Mr. Biden pleaded with a ballroom crowd of 600 in the eastern Iowa city of Dubuque. “History will treat this administration’s time as an aberration.”

“This is not the Republican Party,” he added, citing his relationships with “my Republican friends in the House and Senate.”

There is no disagreement among Democrats about the urgency of defeating Mr. Trump. But Mr. Biden’s singular focus on the president as the source of the nation’s ills, while extending an olive branch to Republicans, has exposed a significant fault line in the Democratic primary.

Democrats, like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, see the president as a symptom of something deeper, both in a Republican Party overtaken by Trumpism and a nation cleaved by partisanship. Simply ousting Mr. Trump, they tell voters, is not enough.

It’s a debate that goes beyond the policy differences separating a moderate like Mr. Biden from an insurgent like Mr. Sanders, elevating questions about whether the old rules of inside-the-Beltway governance still apply. And it has thrown into stark relief one of the fundamental questions facing the Democratic electorate: Do Democrats want a bipartisan deal-maker promising a return to normalcy, or a partisan warrior offering more transformative change?

It's a legitimate question.  The cynical calculus is that Biden can win and do what Obama or Hillary couldn't, because only swingable Obama-Trump voters matter, and they guide all of America.

I don't personally agree with that, but you know what?  I'm not arrogant enough to think my views on the Democratic primary are typical of America, either.  Biden is popular.  He's not my first choice for the Dems, but he's not my last choice either.

We'll see where he goes.  It enrages me that people OK with Trump are now cool with Biden, but I'm but one voter.

Most of all I want the GOP nightmare to end, but getting rid of Trump alone won't fix the problem.  I know that.  You know that.

Does Joe Biden?

Deportation Nation, Con't

Quite a bit on the immigration front this week, as former Trump White House "Adult in the Room ™" John Kelly has landed on his feet on the board of America's biggest supplier of private kiddie concentration camps.

In April, protesters outside the nation's largest facility for unaccompanied migrant children noticed a familiar face enter the massive, fenced site in Homestead, Florida: former White House chief of staff John Kelly. Soon after, a local television station recorded footage of him riding on the back of a golf cart as he toured the grounds.

It wasn't clear why he was there, but Friday, Caliburn International confirmed to CBS News that Kelly had joined its board of directors. Caliburn is the parent company of Comprehensive Health Services, which operates Homestead and three other shelters for unaccompanied migrant children in Texas.

Prior to joining the Trump administration in January 2017, Kelly had been on the board of advisors of DC Capital Partners, an investment firm that now owns Caliburn.

The Caliburn board includes other former high-ranking military personnel, including retired General Anthony C. Zinni, Admiral James G. Stavridis and Rear Admiral Kathleen Martin. The company's portfolio includes work in a variety of defense sectors.

"With four decades of military and humanitarian leadership, in-depth understanding of international affairs and knowledge of current economic drivers around the world, General Kelly is a strong strategic addition to our team," said James Van Dusen, Caliburn's CEO. "Our board remains acutely focused on advising on the safety and welfare of unaccompanied minors who have been entrusted to our care and custody by the Department of Health and Human Services to address a very urgent need in caring for and helping to find appropriate sponsors for these unaccompanied minors."

Kelly joined DC Capital's board in February 2016 and stepped down in January 2017 when he was confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security. Kelly switched jobs in July 2017 to become President Trump's chief of staff, a position he left at the end of 2018.

During Kelly's tenure, the administration pursued ambitious changes to immigration enforcement, and the average length of stay for an unaccompanied migrant child in U.S. custody skyrocketed.

In the past year, Comprehensive Health Services, the only private company operating shelters, became one of the most dominant players in the industry. Last August, it secured three licenses for facilities in Texas, totaling 500 beds, and in December, the Homestead facility began expanding from a capacity of 1,250 beds to 3,200.

Located on several acres of federal land adjacent to an Air Reserve Base, the facility is the nation's only site not subject to routine inspections by state child welfare experts.

Kelly is giving the game away as to what's coming: a massive detention regime as ICE will be rounding up millions, and soon.  Concentration camps for kids is a growth industry, because the Trump regime knows full well these kids will never be reunited and taking kids to deport them is designed as punishment too cruel to imagine.

On the same day the Trump administration said it would reunite thousands of migrant families it had separated at the border with the help of a "central database," an official was admitting privately the government only had enough information to reconnect 60 parents with their kids, according to emails obtained by NBC News.

"[I]n short, no, we do not have any linkages from parents to [children], save for a handful," a Health and Human Services official told a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement on June 23, 2018. "We have a list of parent alien numbers but no way to link them to children."

In the absence of an effective database, the emails show, officials then began scrambling to fill out a simple spreadsheet with data in hopes of reuniting as many as families as they could.

The gaps in the system for tracking separations would result in a months-long effort to reunite nearly 3,000 families separated under the administration's "zero tolerance" policy. Officials had to review all the relevant records manually, a process that continues.

Meanwhile, Trump's constant refrain of "getting rid of immigration judges" is coming closer to reality.

The Department of Homeland Security is racing to implement a plan that would give federal law enforcement on the border the authority to conduct interviews with asylum seekers who fear returning to their home countries, according to two sources with firsthand knowledge of the plan.

Under the pending procedural change, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers would train Border Patrol agents on the southern border how to conduct "credible fear interviews," which immigrants must pass to go on to claim asylum. Agents would conduct the interviews shortly after apprehending people who have illegally crossed from Mexico to the U.S.

The Trump administration is pushing to start agent training “ASAP,” according to one official.

The proposal has some downsides. For instance, there likely would be fewer Border Patrol agents performing law enforcement duties while undergoing training. But that would be offset by an overall decline of undocumented immigrants seeking refuge in the U.S.

“If that gets rolled out and we actually start deporting people within a timely manner, you’re going to see the numbers drop exponentially,” the official said.

This is flat out illegal, but again, we no longer live in a country where rule of law matters.  Trump does what he wants, and many of us go along.  With Border Patrol taking the place of immigration judges and making spot decisions to deny asylum and proceeding to immediate deportation, it's only a matter of time before the same power is used against undocumented already in the US.

And maybe some US citizens too.  Oops.

Serwer's Maxim applies: The cruelty is the point.

 

Last Call For It's About Suppression, Con't

In one of the biggest 2020 election judicial decisions so far, a three-judge panel has struck down Ohio's congressional map as unconstitutional.

A federal court ruled Friday that Ohio’s congressional map is unconstitutional and ordered a new one be drawn for the 2020 elections.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court in Cincinnati ruled unanimously that district boundaries were manipulated for partisan gain by Republican mapmakers and violates voters’ rights to democratically select their representatives. The ruling blocks Ohio from holding another election under the current map.

The ruling is likely to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the judges ordered that the state propose a new map by June 20.

Voters’ rights and Democratic groups who sued Ohio Republican officials said redistricting completed after the 2010 Census yielded a statewide map that has produced an unbending 12-4 Republican advantage in Ohio’s delegation. Republicans said the map was drawn with bipartisan support. They also pointed out that a new map will be drawn anyway after the 2020 Census.

Plaintiffs said Ohioans shouldn’t have to wait for a fair map.

The U.S. Supreme Court is already considering challenges to congressional maps in North Carolina, drawn by Republicans, and Maryland, drawn by Democrats.

In a case similar to Ohio’s, a three-judge panel ruled this month that Michigan’s congressional and legislative maps are unconstitutionally gerrymandered, and ordered the state Legislature to redraw some districts for 2020. The judges wrote that GOP mapmakers in 2011 drew maps with the goal of ensuring “durable majorities” for Republicans. An appeal is likely. 

American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio Legal Director Freda Levenson had said the 10-year map was being challenged because the legal landscape has changed and because the map’s results in terms of partisan representation are easily shown.

The suit called Ohio’s current map “one of the most egregious gerrymanders in recent history,” and that it reliably has done its job of creating a 12-to-4 advantage for Republicans in the state’s congressional delegation despite the GOP having only about half the state’s votes.

It's those NC and Maryland cases before SOCTUS that actually matter.  All indications are that SCOTUS will rule in June that partisan gerrymandering is 100% fine, even given complete admission by North Carolina republicans that race was a massive factor in redrawing districts, because the racism was purely political in nature.

Again, nothing will happen here.  I guarantee you Ohio's map in 2020 will be the same as it is now.

It's Mueller (Report) Time

Jerry Nadler and the House Democrats on the Judiciary Committee are finally playing hardball, giving Attorney General Bill Barr a Monday 9 AM deadline to turn over the unredacted Mueller report and evidence or face a contempt charge.

House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler on Friday sent his latest offerAttorney General William Barr to try to reach an agreement in his effort to obtain the unredacted special counsel report and the underlying evidence before Nadler moves forward with holding the attorney general in contempt of Congress.

Nadler sent Barr a new letter proposing that the committee could work with the Justice Department to prioritize which investigative materials it turns over to Congress, specifically citing witness interviews and the contemporaneous notes provided by witnesses that were cited in the special counsel Robert Mueller's report. Nadler wrote that he was "willing to prioritize a specific, defined set of underlying investigative and evidentiary materials for immediate production." 

But Nadler's letter does not budge on Democrats' insistence that the Justice Department allow Congress to view grand jury material that's redacted in the report, which Barr has argued he's not allowed by law to provide. 

Nadler set a deadline of 9 a.m. ET Monday for Barr to respond and said he would move to contempt proceedings if the attorney general does not comply. 

"The Committee is prepared to make every realistic effort to reach an accommodation with the Department," Nadler wrote in the letter, which was obtained by CNN. "But if the Department persists in its baseless refusal to comply with a validly issued subpoena, the Committee will move to contempt proceedings and seek further legal recourse." 

So the stage is set for Monday morning, and the result will most likely be an immediate court challenge to the contempt charge that will tie up the proceeding for months, if not years.

This will go nowhere, unfortunately.  And it will be forgotten by the end of next week, most likely.  Trump's minders will find a federal judge to issue an injunction on whatever executive privilege nonsense they can get some Federalist Society clerk to write, and this will get hung up in the courts until after the 2020 election when the Roberts court sides with Trump that cabinet secretaries are immune to contempt of Congress.

People forget that AG Eric Holder was cited for contempt of Congress by House Republicans in 2014 and the judge that tossed that contempt citation was none other than Amy Berman Jackson herself, the judge in the Stone and Manafort trials.

Meanwhile, Barr will continue to do whatever he wants, and the Mueller report will remain buried.

Democrats will need to come up with something better than a contempt citation, or the republic is lost.

The Reach To Impeach, Con't

Benjamin Wittes at Lawfare has finally admitted that giving Attorney General Bill Barr the benefit of the doubt was a "catastrophic" idea.

I was willing to give Bill Barr a chance. Consider me burned.

When Barr was nominated, I wrote a cautious piece for this magazine declining to give him “a character reference” and acknowledging “legitimate reasons to be concerned about [his] nomination,” but nonetheless concluding that “I suspect that he is likely as good as we’re going to get. And he might well be good enough. Because most of all, what the department needs right now is honest leadership that will insulate it from the predations of the president.”

When he wrote his first letter to Congress announcing the principal conclusions of the Mueller report, I wrote another piece saying, “For the next two weeks, let’s give Attorney General William Barr the benefit of the doubt” on the question of releasing the report in a timely and not-too-redacted fashion.

I took a lot of criticism for these pieces—particularly the second one, in which I specifically said we should evaluate Barr’s actual performance in regard to releasing the Mueller report, and thus wait for him to act, rather than denouncing him preemptively.

Barr has now acted, and we can now evaluate his actual, rather than his hypothesized, performance.

It has been catastrophic. Not in my memory has a sitting attorney general more diminished the credibility of his department on any subject. It is a kind of trope of political opposition in every administration that the attorney general—whoever he or she is—is politicizing the Justice Department and acting as a defense lawyer for the president. In this case it is true.

And yet, there is very little that Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats can actually do.

Attorney General William Barr’s snub of a House hearing on Robert Mueller’s Russia report exposed that Democrats are in an awkward position: They don’t have any good options for forcing the Trump administration to cooperate with their multiple investigations.

Democrats seeking to compel -- or punish -- Barr and others who ignore Democratic invitations and subpoenas could pursue contempt proceedings, which carry no tangible penalty when branches of government face off, or take action in court, which would be protracted.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leaders are resisting the other obvious option -- moving to impeach the president -- even as Republicans goad them on.

Barr didn’t show up as scheduled Thursday to testify before the House Judiciary Committee, complaining about the format for questioning. That came as Barr and the Justice Department defied a committee subpoena to turn over the full, unredacted version of Special Counsel Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and the evidence behind it.

“This is a great danger to American democracy,” Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler said. "We are going to use what process we have in the courts and elsewhere to get the answers and the information we need."

Meanwhile for his next trick, Bill Barr is arguing that all of Obamacare is unconstitutional because Congress eliminated the individual mandate penalty in 2017.

We're maybe one, two SCOTUS summers max away from an autocracy, guys.

StupidiNews!

• Actor Peter Mayhew, who played Chewbacca in several Star Wars films, died at age 74, the seven-foot-three Mayhew was a fan and convention favorite who entertained for over four decades.
• Alabama Republicans have passed a state House bill criminalizing abortion that would send doctors to jail for performing the procedure, the bill is expected to pass the state Senate.
• One of the injured victims of last month's Christchurch mosque shooting has died at his home in Turkey, bringing the death total to 51, according to Turkish officials.
• NASA says a metals manufacturer faked test results for faulty materials, resulting in the failure of two satellite missions that cost the space agency nearly $700 million.
• The Justice Department is investigating a Mississippi carbon-capture power plant project that scrapped millions in high-tech grant money to build a regular natural gas plant instead.

Last Call For Climate Of Destruction, Con't

Record Midwest flooding continues, this time in Iowa, while the Trump regime keeps insisting that climate change isn't real and that Trump is the best president on disasters or some crap.  The levees broke yesterday and downtown Davenport is basically gone.

For weeks, residents of Davenport, Iowa, looked warily toward the flooded Mississippi River as it encroached on their downtown, the water kept at bay only by temporary barriers lining the street.

On Tuesday, those barriers broke, sending murky river water rushing into businesses and forcing residents to scramble to safety. About 30 people who did not make it out in time were rescued by firefighters.

“The whole city had a very frantic feel about it,” said Rebecca Nicke, a co-owner of Abernathy’s, a vintage store located about half a block from the barrier, who said she ran for her vehicle and drove toward a hill when she heard the water coming.

“You start shaking,” said Ms. Nicke, who salvaged much of her inventory but does not expect to be able to return to her building for weeks. “And everything around me was like a blur.”

The flooding in Davenport, the third-largest city in Iowa, came amid a record-setting year of floods that have devastated cropland, small towns, infrastructure and Native American reservations across a large area of the Midwest. The damage in Davenport was more limited in scope than recent months have brought to parts of Nebraska, Missouri and western Iowa, but it was a reminder of the ongoing risks to the region as rivers rise and rainfall compounds the problems.

In the region around Davenport, the Mississippi has been above major flood stage for 39 days, a record. More rain is in the forecast with few signs of relief ahead.

“We’re not expecting the river to really go down anytime soon,” said Jessica Brooks, a hydrologist at the National Weather Service office in Davenport. “With the levels as high as they are and the flood conditions as they are, any additional rain we get will probably cause additional rises.”

Davenport was not the only place dealing with flooding on Wednesday as storms moved through the region.

In Douglas County, Mo., a 59-year-old man, who was apparently homeless and camping near a creek, was found drowned on Wednesday after a flash flood swept through the area.

Heavy rains also caused flooding in parts of Michigan and Illinois, where officials closed roads and warned residents not to drive through high waters. In Dearborn Heights, Mich., the mayor requested an emergency declaration from the state and opened a shelter for flood victims. In Detroit, officials said they would ask residents to help fill sandbags after water breached a sea wall in a residential area.

More rain, more flooding, more years of 100-year and 1000-year floods happening every 10.  And Republicans will do everything in their power to make America choose between social programs and climate change preparations.  That $2 trillion infrastructure deal won't even get a vote in the Senate, let alone pass.

Republicans will continue to make sure nothing happens, and that they are the ones most able to loot the treasury while the rest of us suffer.

It's Mueller Time, Con't

House Democrats like Nancy Pelosi at least understand what's at stake here with Attorney General Bill Barr's obvious cover-up attempts.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday accused Attorney General William Barr of committing a crime by lying to Congress, blasting him in a closed-door meeting and later at a news conference.

“We saw [Barr] commit a crime when he answered your question,” Pelosi told Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) during a private caucus meeting Thursday morning, according to two sources present for the gathering.

“He lied to Congress. He lied to Congress,” Pelosi said soon after at a news conference. “And if anybody else did that, it would be considered a crime. Nobody is above the law. Not the president of the United States, and not the attorney general.“

The allegation comes as Democrats have intensified their criticisms of the attorney general over his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, his refusal to testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, and the Justice Department’s unwillingness to comply with a subpoena for the full unredacted report.

Pelosi’s comments were an apparent reference to Barr’s response to Crist last month during a House Appropriations Committee hearing, when the attorney general said he was not aware of any concerns that Mueller’s investigators might have expressed about his four-page summary of Mueller’s findings.

Barr’s response appeared to contradict the revelation earlier this week that Mueller himself wrote to the attorney general saying he was worried that Barr’s summary “threatens to undermine ... public confidence” in the Russia probe. Mueller also said Barr’s memo “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the investigation.

So let's get going with those impeachment hearings against Barr at the very minimum, guys. 

It's time to play hardball.  Mocking Barr is one thing.  Arresting him is another.

Giving It Up To Mitch

High-profile Democratic challengers for Senate Republicans are in fact passing on Senate runs, leaving Mitch McConnell free and clear to block any and every cabinet, agency, and federal judge nominee in 2021 of a Democratic president, and I'm disappointed across the board.  Stacey Abrams doesn't want anything to do with David Perdue's seat in Georgia,and now both Beto O'Rourke and Julian Castro are bailing on John Cornyn's seat in Texas, with O'Rourke running for President instead.

All this means Democrats are in serious trouble in the Senate in 2020.

Senate Democrats' bid to take back the majority is running into a big roadblock: Some of their most coveted recruiting targets are refusing to run.

After straining to defend seats in bright-red states in 2018, Democrats are focused on picking off Republicans to claim the Senate majority in 2020. But, so far, a number of the party’s high-profile recruits have said no to Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the party’s campaign arm.

Stacey Abrams, a rising star in the party after nearly winning the Georgia governor’s race last year, passed on a Senate run Tuesday despite a sustained and public recruitment that included multiple meetings with Schumer. Hours later, Rep. Cindy Axne, who flipped a swing district last year, confirmed she was running for the House again — and not challenging Iowa's first-term Republican senator, Joni Ernst.

Democrats haven’t struck out everywhere: Former astronaut Mark Kelly in Arizona was a huge get in a critical battleground state. But three Democrats in other key states have passed on Senate bids to run for president despite the crowded field, and the party has missed out on its top recruits in Georgia and North Carolina.

“The Senate is not an appealing place for smart, talented candidates because it’s a broken institution. And Democrats have not yet offered a vision for how to fix it, aside from wringing their hands and wishing things were different,” said Adam Jentleson, a longtime aide to former Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “What’s the pitch? 'Come here, do nothing and let Mitch McConnell eat your lunch every day?'”

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, chairwoman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, denied she and Schumer had blown it. Democrats need to flip only a handful of seats, and they'll be in a position to get them, she said.

“We don’t need all of these states to take back the majority. We just need three or four. And we’re going to do really well,” Cortez Masto said. “Just because we don’t get somebody that you’re aware of doesn’t mean we’re not going to have somebody that can beat those Republican incumbents.”

Schumer declined to say whether Abrams’ decision was a personal rejection of him but said the party will find a strong candidate to take on freshman Sen. David Perdue.

“We’re going to win in Georgia. And we have lots of good candidates in many different states, including Georgia,” Schumer said.

At this point Chuck Schumer and Catherine Cortez Masto are one for six with Commander Kelly running in Arizona against Martha McSally.  If Dems don't win back the Senate, I guarantee you McConnell will block everything.  Nothing the new Democratic president wants to do will get done.  It won't get passed.  It won't get a vote.  Mitch will block it, period.

And Democrats don't seem to give a damn.

StupidiNews!

Charlotte police are calling UNCC shooting victim Riley Howell a "hero", the 21-year-old student tackled a gunman Tuesday and stopped his rampage but was shot and killed at point blank range.
Asylum officials in Texas say a 16-year-old from Guatemala died in DHS custody over the weekend, the teenager was being held in Brownsville and died after an unknown illness.
A political stalemate in Venezuela continues as opposition leader Juan Guaido's call for an uprising has not yet resulted in the toppling of President Nicolas Maduro.
UK Prime Minister Theresa May and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn are hinting at a compromise Brexit plan in the works that could be revealed as early as next week.
A new research study on drought and climate change finds man-made factors contributing to lack of water as far back as 1950.